Respond to email notifications

Email notifications can be set up to help you stay in the loop whenever a conversation is updated. This article talks about enabling email notifications, and responding to them using special email-only commands.

In this article

What's an email notification?

Based on your notification settings, Help Scout sends you a message when certain conversation events take place. Without logging in, you can reply to a conversation, add a note, or change the status...and those are just a few of the helpful commands available.

Note: Help Scout email notifications are unique to the User and the conversation. Only the person who received the notification can reply to it. In other words, you can't forward your own email notification to another User or a third-party.

Enabling email notifications

Before we carry on, head over to your profile page and click on the Notifications tab on the left-hand sidebar. Enable the notifications you'd find useful by checking the boxes, then hitting the blue Save Notifications button at the bottom of the page.

If you have multiple mailboxes, you can customize notifications per mailbox by selecting the option at the top of the page. Oh, and now might be a good time to give this page a quick once-over.

Responding to notifications

A customer just emailed our support address and the conversation was created in Help Scout. Since we've elected to be notified when a new conversation is created, we received a Help Scout email notification in our Gmail inbox. Here's what we need to do:

1

Understand what you're looking at! You'll see some familiar elements in the notifications. In our example below, you can see that the message was sent to the
Nakatomi Plaza Support mailbox. The conversation number, the customer name, subject, and message text are also included in every notification.

2

Pull up
this handy list of email commands and compose your reply. We're going to add a note and assign the conversation to another User in Help Scout. Type your commands at the very top of the text box, and be mindful of spacing. Extra spaces or characters will break the commands.

3

After you've sent your reply, head over to Help Scout and find the conversation. Here's what this particular conversation looks like after being updated via the email integration:

Remember: These commands can only be used when replying to an email notification or when forwarding a message manually into Help Scout. You can't use them when replying through the Help Scout interface. Also, if you add a note, you won't be able to add any additional text to reply to the customer.